Christmas Budget/Shopping?

[Chris]

I spend way too much at Christmas. I have 5 kids and probably spent about 300.00 roughly on each of them, however they get WAY too much and every year I say I'm going to cut down. I HOPE i mean it this year.
Then I have 14 nieces and nephews. I keep them at 25.00 per child.
I also buy for my MIL and single BIL.
On my side, we do a grab for the adults, 50.00 limit so that's 100.00 <dh and I>.
Then add in teachers, bus driver, mailman and rubbish guys.

 

[mom2dea]

we do 100-150 per child IF THAT .... We just can NOT afford much more . We also do the same on each other and the same on our parents .
Each kid in my family (7 this yr ) get 10.00 spent on them and then my kids draw for names from dh side agian 10.00 and then me and dh get names and 25.00 each .
I think I just added up almost 1000.00 not including grandparents .... uggggg see this is why we can't have tons of things .

OHHH another thing we do 3 boxes of presents and 1 stocking per person (kids parents and each other )

Sarah

 

[MomOf2DisneyKids]

bump!!

 

[MEM]

We started at the Bath and Body Works Christmas clearance. Call us scrooge--but we've trimmed everyone to $15. Real value is more of course.

I'm tired of 4 figured Christmasses...and we will be incorporating homemade gifts this year. The $15 cap is the start of the weaning process.

Children is $100 per--but each Christmas has a purpose behind the gifts and we stick with 3 gifts per...usually 2 gifts each and 1 gift shared.

Someone posted what they do last year...something about Something Needed, Something to read, something fun, something to wear---something like that anyway.

If anybody knows more about that I would be interested.

I posted something like this...I had read about a Victorian tradition in which children receive four gifts from Santa: something they want, something they need, something to play with and something to read. I have done this with my 2 , DS11 and DD9 for the past five years. I refuse to participate in the feeding frenzy where each Christmas has to be bigger and better. I saw that play out in my sister's household and it made me ill. JMHO.